This looks like a Southern Yellowjacket queen, a native wasp found across much of Maryland. Queen wasps tend to be bigger than their worker counterparts and sometimes have slightly different body patterns and coloration; in this case, more orange in the abdomen instead of only yellow and black.

Yellowjacket wasps, like other social wasps (hornets and paper wasps), do not re-use nests from one year to the next, so come winter, all activity in the nest this queen hatched from will cease and the workers and old queen will die. Young queens are raised by the colony around late summer and autumn, and they mate and leave the colony of their birth to find a sheltered spot to overwinter alone. A queen will then begin a new nest by herself in spring in another location, though not all are successful. Since queens have little motivation to defend a nest at this point because they do not participate in raising their sisters, queens will be unlikely to sting unless grabbed. Workers from her home nest, though, can become fairly defensive late in the season since they are more desperate for food to supply their large population, and Yellowjacket workers have a reputation for stinging if a nest is disturbed.

Miri